Allen Gee — 2013 Awards Program — Nonfiction

The 2015 Literary Awards Program ends on November 2nd. Grand prize is $1500, and two runner ups will receive $1000 each. Those three will also be evaluated for publication with SFWP, receiving a competitive contract for a full market, frontlist publication. There have been 39 past winners since the Program began in 2000. 90% of those winners have gone on to publication, and six of them have been published through SFWP. You can find all of the Program details right here.

Publishing Allen Gee’s collection of essays, My Chinese-America, was a very new experience for SFWP. Our catalog has always tended more towards literary fiction and, when Gee took the second place prize in the 2013 Awards Program, judged by Lee Gutkind, we weren’t sure if we could support the title. Turns out, we had nothing to worry about. Gee’s work has flown off the shelves and is making an impact on everyone who picks it up.

Dr. Allen Gee is a graduate of The University of New Hampshire, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and The University of Houston. He is an associate professor of English at Georgia College, where he teaches in the M.F.A. program and edits for the journal Arts & Letters. In My Chinese-America Gee writes about aspects of Asian-American life in a detailed, eloquent manner, looking at how Asian-Americans view themselves in light of America’s insensitivities, stereotypes, and expectations. The collection speaks on masculinity, identity, and topics ranging from Jeremy Lin to immigration to profiling to Asian silences. Publishers Weekly said: “Masculinity, mobility, history, and the American dream of equality all take their turn under Gee’s lens, as he shrewdly navigates a culture saturated with the privilege of white America and the realities of continued segregation in the so-called New South.” Find it right here.